Last game you finished, tell us about it

Went back and started XCom: Enemy Within over. Had a much better run this time around, made it past the base defense, and won the game. They did a very good job capturing the magic of the original while adding some interesting new things to the game. I had to wait on this one until I had good enough hardware to run it, but this one was well worth the wait.
well played! did you like the plot of the last area or did you just sort of grin and bear it? have to admit that while I enjoyed every minute of the game, the ending didn't quite feel right...
 
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I've been waiting for a good deal for both the base game and the expansion together. :)
You missed it, actually. They had the package (game + expansion + 2 DLC) on sale for like $15 a couple months back.
 
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well played! did you like the plot of the last area or did you just sort of grin and bear it? have to admit that while I enjoyed every minute of the game, the ending didn't quite feel right…
I've always thought pretty much all the XCom games had lousy endings. UFO:Extraterrestrials (a very good XCom ripoff) had one of the worst endings ever, which actually made it true to the original.

I actually paid a little better attention to the conversation this time around than when I finished the "standard" game. It was sorta interesting how they went thru the progression, but when all was said and done, they wrapped it up with a truly lousy ending. Just like they should... ;)
 
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LOL, dte. First time I heard someone praise a bad ending. :)
 
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I finally returned to Eschalon Book 3 after the steam patch update and over the past two weeks, have had a good fun time in slowly completing it. Took me about 30 hours in game. I'm satisfied that there weren't any other bugs similar to those I experienced prior to the patch.

I played a mage without any of the extra challenges enabled; that's something I'll have to try with replay, maybe with a ranged character, since I had such a tough grinding time with melee in Book 2. I also like that in Book 3 you have a M&M style certificate which you can save for posterity.

The soundtrack to Book 3 is quite lovely; sedate yet aptly heroic, moving and inspiring with shades of Soule. I'd love to see Basilisk make a soundtrack compilation available for fans with all three games actually, would be a nice exclamation point on a fun little trilogy.

I think I'll move on to Blackguards now and see what the Watcher fuss is about. ;)
 
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You missed it, actually. They had the package (game + expansion + 2 DLC) on sale for like $15 a couple months back.
The XCOM package is back at $15 again during Steam's Autumn sale, by the way.

On topic: Finished Rollers of the Realm. Short and sweet!
 
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Watch_Dogs: It's a ubisoft "open world" game. If you've played any of the Ubisoft open world games since Assassin's Creed 1, you know roughly what you are in for, and Watch_Dogs does not do anything significant to differentiate itself.

You have a relatively large overworld map (in this case a city and a small area outside the city), populated by regular NPCs. There are towers that you can climb to unlock side quests & fast travel points in the area around the tower, there are lots of inconsequential and very repetitive side missions which more or less just boil down to "pick up this item" or "kill all the enemies in this area", with no real story context. So pretty much the same deal as Assassin's Creed, or Far Cry 3. Only the inconsequential side missions felt even less interesting in this game than in those.

The main campaign though, that one was actually rather nice. It was nothing groundbreaking, and in 2 years time I won't remember much about it, but I enjoyed it when I played it. The gimmick of the game is that you can "hack" (remote use) a lot of things, and this resulted in some interesting fight sequences, where the environment could be used to great effect against the enemies. Sadly due to inconsistent level design, not all fights offered any meaningful ways of actually using the environment against the enemies, and at these points, the game played like a sub-par corridor shooter, as the gunplay was less than satisfying.

The game story felt like a typical Hollywood "hacker" movie, in other words, lots of action and explosions, plenty of technobabble that made little sense and some anti-corporate/government messages. And as a stupid "hacker" movie-style story, the story in Watch_Dogs is not bad. Sadly the tone of the game ends up conflicting with itself constantly. On the one hand the game the game tells you how bad it is that the government & corporations can watch your every move, on the other hand you as the player use this very system to prevent crimes, make sure that bad people can't do their bad deeds and so on. Also, the game allows you to just randomly steal from peoples bank accounts (where in Assassin's creed you could pickpocket random people on the street, here you hack their cellphones to steal from them), which makes no real sense for your character to do from a story point of view (and little sense from a gameplay point of view either, as you really don't need any money).

Overall, the game is not bad, but it's not great either. If you want a modern day "open world" game with a more serious tone, play Sleeping Dogs instead, it does most things better than Watch_dogs.
 
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Shadow Warrior - the closest thing you get for a modern Doom.
Some skills, stats and upgradeable weapons are great for us CRPG fans.
Challenging & fun - very good FPS.
 
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Just finished a replay of Wolfenstein.

Wolfenstein is the sequel to Return to Castle Wolfenstein and the prequel to Wolfenstein: The New Order. Unlike the other games in the series, Wolfenstein is a semi open-world game with several hub areas that allow you to travel freely back and forth. There's a degree of exploration in the game and a significant amount of hidden items to discover. You can also upgrade your weapons in multiple ways which gives it a bit of an RPG feel.

You also have arcane powers through the use of a medallion you find at the start of the game. The medallion lets you enter an alternate dimension called the Veil which allows you to see certain things you couldn't see otherwise. It also gives you a few offensive powers as well. Interestingly enough, the Thule mythology in the game is loosely based on a real-life German occult that existed in the early 1900's.

I played through Wolfenstein once when it was released back in 2009 and had mixed feelings about it. While it retained the great atmosphere from Return to Castle Wolfenstein, it was obvious that it was designed for consoles. There's an onscreen compass and quest marker that are always pointing you in the right direction and constant prompts like "press x to reload weapon" popping up on the screen. I found those things annoying to the point where it detracted from the overall experience.

I enjoyed it a lot more this time around thanks to the Retrostein mod. Retrostein removes all those unnecessary and annoying console influences and makes it a much more immersive experience.

If you're a fan of the series and have never played this game, I highly recommend it. Just make sure you play the PC version with the mod I mentioned. You'll also have to track down a physical copy or download a cracked copy since it's not currently available as a digital purchase.
 
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I finished the "game" of installing OS/2 3 "WARP" on MS Virtual PC yesterday evening. :D

This morning, however, the CD drive refused to open. :mad:

Among my floppies I had - to my sheer surprise ! - actually found 2 working floppies which enabled me to use the OS/2 3 WARP CD-ROM for installation - and that within a plan virtual PC created via MS Virtual PC 2007 … No DOS or other OS loaded into that before …

It was a blast, finally seeing that OS coming up after more than 1 decade !

But - it has no internet connection (yet). I'd have to use "OS/2 WARP Connect" for that, an slightly different product.

Had I been using OS/2 v4, things would have been much easier.

One of the most problematic things, however, is, that I can't use this OS … Especially with no internet access …

Since then, I've been reading through the excellent web site called "OS/2 Museum" ...
 
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What are you using OS/2 for? As much as I love dos , I've been intrigued by the idea of using virtual box or virtual PC to run the actual old DOS for some games that don't work quite right in DosBox. I've also toyed with building don't vintage PCs, but frankly I don't have the space!
 
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Just finished a replay of Wolfenstein.
I enjoyed it a lot more this time around thanks to the Retrostein mod. Retrostein removes all those unnecessary and annoying console influences and makes it a much more immersive experience.

If you're a fan of the series and have never played this game, I highly recommend it. Just make sure you play the PC version with the mod I mentioned. You'll also have to track down a physical copy or download a cracked copy since it's not currently available as a digital purchase.

Perfect timing for this post JDR13 as I picked up a discount copy of this at Walmart a couple of days ago and just about to play it, glad to hear about that mod, thanks.
 
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What are you using OS/2 for? As much as I love dos , I've been intrigued by the idea of using virtual box or virtual PC to run the actual old DOS for some games that don't work quite right in DosBox. I've also toyed with building don't vintage PCs, but frankly I don't have the space!

Well, I have no real purpose yet, I must admit. Especially without any kind of internet connection I just can't use it for safer internet browsing.

I did lots of disk images of DOS games in the past, which I could try out there. However, I have no idea yet in how far I will succeed. I simply haven't tried it out yet.

I also did disk images of DOS version I have here - the earliest bundled with my early PCs, later ones bought on flea markets.

I have disk images of:

- MS DOS 6 (already installed in an VMK
- MS DOS 6.2 (unfortunately my virus scanner claimed the image of disk 1 to be infected by an "rootkit")
- IBM DOS 5.02 (already installed in an VM)
- Novell DOS 7 (not yet installed)

I should also have MS DOS 6.22 somewhere, or, rather the so-.called "STEP-UP" by Microsoft.

One of my next projects is to install BeOS. That will be really difficult, according to some web sites.

OS/2 V3 Warp really needs not much more than 2 GB of HD space, I think. So far it's not even 100 MB, fresh install.
The most difficult point in installing is to get those 2 disks which enable a very basic core of OS/2 to "see" the CD-ROM. But there do exist floppy-based versions of it out there, too (just saw some in Ebay).

As much as I love dos , I've been intrigued by the idea of using virtual box or virtual PC to run the actual old DOS for some games that don't work quite right in DosBox.

Virtual PC 2007 from Microsoft is actually kind of Freeware,
but I *strongly* suggest that you install Virtual PC 2004 FIRST, because it has some tools which the 2007 version doesn't have anymore … (The so-called "Virtual Machine Additions), I believe that they might important for working with DOS, for example.)

What I was unable to find yet is a fitting graphics driver for VPC (it should be an S3 driver, I've read).

Quoted from Microsoft :

Virtual PC Additions provides features that integrate a guest PC with the host PC. Virtual PC Additions includes the following features:

Drag-and-drop functionality
Folder sharing
Integrated mouse support
Joystick support
International keyboard support
DOS CD-ROM support
Optimized video driver support
Virtual PC Helper (including SyncTime functionality)

To use these features, you must install Virtual PC Additions on the guest PC after you install the operating system on the guest PC. Virtual PC Additions is available for the following Microsoft Windows operating systems:

Microsoft Windows XP
Microsoft Windows 2000
Microsoft Windows Millennium Edition
Microsoft Windows NT 4.0
Microsoft Windows 98

Source : http://support.microsoft.com/kb/824561/en-us
 
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Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove 2

I like HOGs. They're fun, easy, relaxing and fun. And typically can be solved in a relatively quick time. The perfect pill if you tire of the 100+ hour game sessions and
want a quick fix for a sense of accomplishment.

And the first Dire Grove game was mostly an HOG with some puzzles thrown in. Additionally, it had a very curious but satisfying ending where you are congratulated at some kind of detective seminar.

But then they had to go fiddle with the game mechanics and came up with this mess. This is mostly a puzzler with only a few HOGs thrown in. The story is decent enough but the puzzles were of the left field variety. The type that make many gamers hate point and click.

And get this, the game had puzzle bosses. Yep that's right, puzzle bosses. You're playing the game and solving the in-game puzzles that mostly tie into the game then BLAM . . . they plague you with a mini game puzzler. There were 5 of them. Fortunately the game allows you to skip the mini puzzle. Unfortunately the mini puzzle contains about 10 game/puzzles so if you skip one you skip all. Also unfortunately the skip button is close to the hint button, and of course yours truly is also know as "Thumbs Too Big." . . . oh man

Still, I eventually solved the game but unfortunately no game ending congrats at the detective seminar. Oh well, my back scratcher is shaped like a hand. Kudos to Me.
 
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Perfect timing for this post JDR13 as I picked up a discount copy of this at Walmart a couple of days ago and just about to play it, glad to hear about that mod, thanks.

I'm surprised you were able to still find a copy at a retail store. Fwiw, I actually had to torrent a copy because my original retail copy wouldn't finish the install process on Windows 8.1. Ironically though, I still had to insert the DVD every time I started it to pass the disc-check.

If you're decent at shooters, I recommend playing the "Bring 'Em On" difficulty. The normal difficulty is too easy imo.
 
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Finished Wasteland 2.
Won't write memoires, the game is awsome, there are still a few glitches inside that are to blame on the engine, nothing serious though.
If someone still didn't buy or play it, do not miss this game. Seriously. It's worth every penny.

Who shouldn't buy Wasteland 2? Every one who got used to skip all side content and rush to the end and yell "I beat the game in 10 minutes". Such thing is impossible in Wasteland 2. And I love it. So different from this year's AAA grinder.
 
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I used OS/2 at work to run a phone system for years. It was extremely reliable and never crashed once. The only reason I got rid of it is because we were closing down a remote office and they had a nice new voip system so I replaced our old one with that.
 
I just finished Metro: 2033.

I read the book first which interested me enough to pick up the game.

I want to like this game but in the end the cons outweigh the pros.

The setting and backstory are great. I love the underground, the ruin, the mutants, the everpresent darkness, the lack of resources (at times), etc ...

The game is linear, there is no real exploring to be done or choices to be made besides picking weapons. No levels, no stat points or skill points at all. Even tho you need to stealth around quite a bit (you die very easy in this game) you cannot lean out past a corner or lay down to snipe. Bullets are scarce and you will be searching everything in order to get enough to keep going (in the beginning). About chapter 5, the game finally starts to give you enough ammo to feel safe about running out. Having enough filter time for my gas mask was another part that irritated me for most of the game. While you could always pick up ammo the game would only let you have X amount of filter time and sometimes (most of the time) it wouldn't let you pick up filters even tho they were laying on the ground right in front of you. There were two parts in the game where I just had to sprint thru the area so I wouldn't run of filter time and die so never really got to explore the area. Later in the game they finally supplied enough filters for this to not be a problem.

The game had alot of short areas and it just never felt cohesive. I often had no idea what I was supposed to do until I explored the area a bit and died 10 times.

When the game ended I just felt meh. So much potential but I won't be continuing the story in Metro: Last Light.
 
Thanks, you made me feel better that I removed the metro series from my steam wishlist.

Just finished batman arkham city. It was okay. The fighting mechanics were odd at the beginning but pretty fun when you get used to it (as promised). I'm really starting to hate the trophy collecting stuff in games. Some puzzle based ones are fun but there are just too bloody much of them. Extra frustrating as a completionist.

I suppose people who grew up with US comics will catch any references better than I did.
 
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